Perhaps it’s a personal response – reading and watching texts with graphic depictions of sexual crimes really upset me. Jack and Julie, spurred on by fears of separating the family, take on the parental role, babying their youngest sibling to the point of regression, and it culminates in the final interaction between them as lovers, consummating their relationship while Derek discovers the body of the mother.

Seemingly, McEwan is touching on ideas about carnal desires, and the innate desire to be an ‘adult’ and readers of The Cement Garden see how the family descends into a state of neglect over just a few chapters. The only novel I could think to compare it to The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, for its unsettling nature and repulsive events. The story opens with quite a graphic description of siblings exploring bodies, which when you reconsider it, is a depiction of sexual assault of a young girl and further descriptions are equally as graphic, and as a teacher of teenagers, there was nothing darkly exciting about it, like you might find in books about murders, or torture. I was not expecting incest to be the underlying conflict within the plot. Having read Atonement, and Enduring Love, I knew that McEwan touches dark topics, including rape and mental instability. McEwan managed to make me feel a little sick to my stomach, to be entirely honest. This particular sense isn’t relieved by the introduction of Derek, the boyfriend of Jack’s oldest sister, Julie, who just serves as another layer of conflict within the family. The family already seemed dysfunctional, but as the story progresses, the relationship between the siblings becomes more unsettling. Fear of separation leads the children to bury their mother’s body in cement in the basement of the house instead of seeking help.

Their father dies suddenly from a heart attack, and their mother dies not long after. The story follows the four siblings’ summer, following the deaths of both of their parents. The Cement Garden is told through the perspective of Jack, the second oldest child of four siblings. Part of me was glad it was only 138 pages long. Not quite comparable to IT by Stephen King levels, but it did leave me questioning what was going on in McEwan’s head at the time. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan is one of the more unsettling that I’ve read.

The cement garden book review